TWITTER UPDATES

Episode 35, Friday 17 October , 2008

Wise Words - Episode 35

Why is the word 'forehead' sometimes pronounced 'forrid' and which is correct? Fran, ACT

A close colleague of mine, Kersti Boerjars, relates a lovely linguistic story involving her small daughter Ellen. At the age of three Ellen fell over in the playground and tearfully informed the nursery staff that she had hurt her “two-head”. When she’d finally calmed down a bit, she corrected herself and said: “I mean my forehead”. Ellen had clearly worked out that words can consist of more than one part and that these can exist as independent words. She thought of this word as “four-head”, but being so upset from her fall she’d got the number wrong.

Ellen had recognised the word as a compound 'fore-head' and had pronounced it as such. But many of you would probably prefer the shortened version 'forrid'. And you’d be in good company – this is also the only pronunciation given by the major dictionaries. It is also a pronunciation that has been around a long while. You might remember the Longfellow verse from 1882: ‘There was a little girl, and she had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead; When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid”. Here 'forrid' has to rhyme with ‘horrid’. Authorities of this time also recommended 'forrid'. Alexander J Ellis, a great phonetician of the 1800s, wrote that the pronunciation 'fore-head' is “never heard”. In fact even as early as 400 years before Ellis’s time, people were saying 'forrid'. We know this because they occasionally wrote it ‘forred’.

Modern spelling, though, shows that the word did begin life as a compound of ‘fore’ meaning “front” plus ‘head’ — but the 'h' dropped off, and both vowels shortened. Time and the processes of sound change grind expressions down. One thousand years ago, the word was even longer — it would have been pronounced ‘forheafod’ — the word ‘head’ (now one syllable) used once to have three syllables ‘heafod’. So three vowels have reduced to one, and the 'f' has dropped out.

But occasionally speakers have a change of heart and return the full pronunciations. This is what is currently happening to 'forrid'. What drives people to bring back earlier pronunciations like 'fore-head' is presumably the clout of the written language. If letters appear in a word, then many people feel they should be sounded.

Why is it 'awful' for a negative and 'awesome' for a positive, with the different spellings of 'awe'? Rachel, NSW

The word ‘awesome’, as its shape suggests, began life meaning something like ‘full of awe’. This words ‘awe’ first appeared during the 9th century. At that time it referred to ‘terror’ or ‘dread’ but because it was so often used in reference to beings divine, it shifted more to a ‘terror’ or ‘dread’ that was mixed with veneration — ‘a respectful or reverential fear’ is how the Oxford English Dictionary describes it. So when in the 16th century the compound awesome first appeared, it had the meaning ‘profoundly reverential’. A little later it was used to mean ‘dreadful’ or ‘appalling’— here’s one example from the 1800s: ‘together did the awesome sisters cry’. So it still had the sense of ‘inspiring awe’ but it was beginning to be used in a more general intensifying sense. And this of course is the direction it’s continued to travel. By the mid 1900s awesome was being used to mean something like ‘outstanding’, ‘remarkable’ and finally ‘excellent’, ‘marvellous’, as in all those ‘awesome achievements’ by our athletes during the Olympics. As early as the late 1800s, its derived adverb ‘awesomely’ was already being used as a general intensifier — still a stronger alternative to ‘very’, admittedly, but completely emptied of those very strong emotions that were around earlier when people were being overwhelmed by awe. From the mid 1900s onwards we find examples like ‘an awesomely successful sketch’.

All this is a fine example of what you could think of as a linguistic ‘weakening’ or ‘bleaching’ process, and it’s one of the most significant driving forces behind semantic change. As you well know — humans are natural born exaggerators. We constantly endeavour to enhance expression, seeking more forceful, more exciting ways of saying something. And quite simply, emotional extravagance in language goes hand in hand with bleaching of this kind — as someone once put it, over time ‘words become shadows of their former selves’.

The word ‘awful’ began life in the 9th century with the meaning of ‘causing terror or dread’. It went down precisely the same semantic path as awesome with the sense shifting to ‘profound respect’ or ‘reverential fear’, and by the 1800s to ‘frightful’, ‘monstrous’ and then more generally ‘exceedingly bad’. Its derived adverb shows an even more spectacular weakening. The trouble is when I try to characterise its earlier meaning with words like ‘terribly’, ‘dreadfully’, ‘frightfully’, these convey absolutely nothing of the shocking nature of this word in early times because they’ve all undergone precisely the same bleaching process. Originally when something was qualified with ‘awfully’ it involved being ‘terror-stricken’ which is of course why it was recruited as an intensifier — it was so powerful. But by the early 1800s it meant simply ‘extremely’ — really it was little stronger than ‘very’.

And just to conclude, the reason ‘awful’ and ‘awfully’ doesn’t jar as much for people as ‘awesome’ is simply that the change happened a little earlier; so we’re more acclimatised to this one.

Where did the word ‘snoring’ come from? Courtney, email

This word is imitative — it started life in the 1400s as a vocal representation of the snorting noise made by animals and then the similar sort of noisy sound some of us make when we sleep. It was clearly modelled along the lines of ‘snork’ (which came originally from Dutch and meant ‘to snore’) and ‘snort’ which also meant ‘to snore’ in the 1300s.

The consonant cluster ‘sn’ is what is called a phonestheme. It often happens that we start to associate certain sounds or sound sequences with particular meanings, and these then are used in the formation of new words when the patterns get extended. English has lots of these phonesthemes. In this case, the sn- words often convey something unpleasant, although it can be hard to pinpoint the nastiness, and of course many words also have associations with the nose: snuffle, snout, snarl, snort, sneak, sneer, sneeze, snipe, snivel, snot, snoop, sneeze, sniff and so on. So it’s feasible that snore arose as a sound symbolic word, influenced by the words snork and snort.

We are constantly making associations between sound and sense in this way. Here we’ve made a connection between ‘sn’ and the nose. And probably because of this, that early English speakers remodelled the original words ‘fnese’ to sneeze — so that the words fell more in line with the other nosey ‘sn’ words. Individual sounds aren’t supposed to have meanings — but clearly that’s not what speakers think!